Paula Biren, Ruth Elias, Ada Lichtman, Hanna Marton: Four Jewish women, witnesses and survivors of the most insane and pitiless barbarism, and who, for that reason alone, but for many others also, deserve to be inscribed forever into the memory of humankind. What they have in common, beside the specific horrors to which each of them were subjected, is a searingly sharp, almost-physical intelligence, which rejects all pretense or faulty reasoning. In a word, idealism.

The final films from Claude Lanzmann, acclaimed director of The Last of The Unjust and Shoah

Starting in 1999, Claude Lanzmann made several films that could be considered satellites of Shoah, comprised of interviews conducted in the 1970s that didn’t make it into the final, monumental work. In the last years of the late director’s life, he decided to devote a film to four women from four different areas of Eastern Europe with four different destinies, each finding herself improbably alive after war’s end: Ruth Elias; Paula Biren; Ada Lichtman; and Hannah Marton. Survivors of unimaginable Nazi horrors during the Holocaust, they tell their individual stories and become crucial witnesses to the barbarism they experienced. Each possesses a vivid intelligence and a commitment to candour that make their accounts of what they suffered through both searing and unforgettable.

The Four Sisters reminds audiences of the immense courage it took for these witnesses to return to their past as they share their deeply moving personal tragedies. The frankness of their words, their intensely scrutinized faces, and their bravery as they revisit unimaginable experiences will make them lasting presences in the moral universe of younger generations.

“What they have in common,” wrote Lanzmann, “apart from the specific horrors each one of them was subjected to, is their intelligence, an incisive, sharp and carnal intelligence that rejects all pretense and false reasons-in a word-idealism.” Lanzmann’s films remarkably stay within the immediate present tense, where the absolute horror of the Shoah is always happening.

on Blu-ray & DVD February 18, 2018!

Gerard Iribe is a writer/reviewer for Why So Blu?. He has also reviewed for other sites like DVD Talk, Project-Blu, and CHUD, but Why So Blu? is where the heart is. You can follow his incoherency on Twitter: @giribe

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